One thought on “The one we have been waiting for: Your guide to the Facebook revolt of 2010!network”

“If it’s played right, Diaspora can become an ecosystem. I believe many of my friends would rather use my own Diaspora server (and know I am responsible for their data) than go to some huge corporate monster. So, collective “seeds” would emerge, with several geeks running each seed and hundreds of users hosting their data on it. You would also have companies providing seed hosting just like the Facebook of today. It will all come down to personal choice eventually. All of the seeds would be able to talk to each other, so it wouldn’t really matter what seed your profile is hosted on.”

The overwhelming majority of Facebook users who are getting so excited at the prospect of some flashy, new, ultra-private social network with a catchy name — a name presented in Helvetica and completed with a superfluous asterisk — have no idea how the network is supposed to work. Many of these people are likely the ones who donated so much money to the project, especially since a big selling point used to get people to donate higher amounts is that they’ll get an actual CD mailed to them along with access to free phone support.

Oh yes, they’re already planning on making money off of phone support.

The bottom line here is that so few people will ever use this vaporware (were it ever to materialize in the first place) that it simply won’t succeed. It doesn’t stand a chance against a network like Facebook — no matter how evil it may be — because Facebook isn’t evil by accident. Its massive numbers of users allow it to be that way. If the majority of people actually cared enough about their online privacy, then they’d leave Facebook. They don’t, so it’s difficult to imagine that these kids will ever see their little cloned project become a network of 10,000 users, much less one that includes “every man, woman, and child” like they actually had the audacity to state as their end-of-summer goal.

Basically, if you donated money to these guys, you didn’t participate in some grand assault against Facebook’s foothold on the Internet. You probably paid for an appletini or two (of thousands) that will be consumed over the course of the next few summer months … as they party their faces off. And why shouldn’t they? They only asked for $10,000 in pledges. They’ve just pulled off a heist worthy of a bad Hollywood movie.